Endowments: New Questions in the New Normal

The financial crisis is in the past, more or less, and campuses are looking ahead to a new era for their endowments. But what does this mean? Four years on, we’ve come to grips with the changes wrought by the September 2008 market crash. Finance departments are revising their theories and boards of trustees are revising their expectations under what has been called the “new normal”—a time of low stock market returns, low interest rates, and low growth in personal income.